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Paradise Regained Santa Barbara may be perfect, but it's not Tucson. By Susan Zakin I just came back from a place most people consider paradise. No, I'm not dead, although I suspect a few Tucson politicians and real estate developers might be disappointed to hear that. The editor of a new national magazine called me up before Christmas and asked me to write a story about suburban sprawl. I guess he thought that I knew all about it, since I lived here. One of the things I had to do was find a place that hadn't succumbed to the tender mercies of men like Jim Click and Don Diamond. The choice came down to Boise, Boulder and Santa Barbara. Tough one. Boise in January? If the temperature drops below 80, I start shivering. So off I went to Lotusland. Or Mini-Lotusland, I guess. It was great. Santa Barbara did everything right. First, it's near the beach and the mountains. Second, the little shelf of land between both of those geographic wonders is cracked with faultlines. In 1925, Santa Barbara broke apart in a big earthquake and the city got a second chance. In the 19th century, Santa Barbara had been a fairly typical California town. But by the early 20th century Santa Barbara had become a spa resort, a playground for the second sons of rich Eastern families, many of whom were gay, or, even worse, artistic. Some were merely crazy, like the heir to the McCormick farm implement fortune who was hidden away here for decades, a story told in shudderingly imaginative detail by T.C. Boyle in the novel Riven Rock. When the earthquake hit, a professional volunteer named Pearl Chase got many of these people together. They became the Design Nazis of Santa Barbara. By god, it worked. Santa Barbara became a Spanish colonial theme park. A tasteful Spanish colonial theme park. These wealthy people also bought up precious shoreline land and donated it to the public. You can sneer and call it noblesse oblige, but a whole lot of Santa Barbara is on the national register of historic places and Santa Barbara's beachfront is open to the public. Any U.S. city trying to control development needs luck. Santa Barbara not only had the earthquake and rich people, but also a limited supply of water. The city was immune to the worst of the post World War II housing boom. As author and academic Adam Rome writes in The Bulldozer in the Countryside (my new Bible), the U.S. government began a concerted campaign to subsidize home construction after World War II. The intentions were good--the American dream and all that--but there were unintended consequences, like leaking septic tanks, destruction of wildlife habitat on a vast scale, and gross overconsumption of energy by tract houses that didn't take into account regional climate differences. The worst thing about it may have been the way big developers got hooked on subsidies and plugged in to the political process. Santa Barbara had another stroke of luck in the 1970s, when a new generation of Pearl Chases reached adulthood, or what passed as adulthood in those days. These were the student radicals, some of whom burned the Bank of America in the nearby town of Isla Vista, the nearby town where students from the University of Santa Barbara live. Many of them not only stayed in Santa Barbara, but went into politics. Why this didn't happen in a more widespread fashion in Tucson, I can't possibly imagine. Perhaps Arizona was so dyed-in-polyester conservative that anyone with a conscience was too repelled to go into what is generally called public service, but would more aptly be called something else. Around this time, someone had the wisdom to ask a professor named Harvey Molotch to look at Santa Barbara's future. Molotch and Richard Appelbaum did a landmark study called "The Impacts of Growth." They found that Santa Barbara would retain its quality of life best if it kept the population down to between 100,000 and 150,000. But the city was already zoned for more than that. Here in Tucson, every time I ask about a grotesque development that clearly shouldn't be there, like the obnoxious gated community called Sweetwater Gulch or whatever it is in the Tucson Mountains, someone says, "We can't do anything about it. It was approved thirty years ago" Not in Santa Barbara. Pearl Chase was still alive in the 1970s. Miss Chase and the student radicals and the professorial Jeffersonian New Leftists and the back-to-the-landers and the rich people all got together and they changed the game. They forced the City Council to cut housing permits in half, limiting Santa Barbara's population to 90,000 people. The city is almost built out now, and it's not going to grow anymore. One of the reasons Santa Barbara could do this is that people weren't afraid to say something that you could hardly dare to whisper in Tucson. What the Santa Barbarians said, basically, is this: "We don't want too many new jobs." You see, newly created jobs often don't go to the people who already live in a town. How many engineers at Raytheon grew up in Tucson? I've never met a single one who didn't migrate here for work. Tucson's current courtship of high-tech businesses sounds good, I'll admit. But it's worth taking a look at all the consequences. Remember what Edward Abbey wrote about growth for its own sake. Something about the ideology of the cancer cell, wasn't it? As I flew back to Tucson, happy to breathe the dry, if bizarrely cold air, and see the nice, naked, brown mountains again, I was reminded of something else Abbey wrote, in Desert Solitaire: "Under the desert sun, in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist ... .What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime." Welcome back to paradise, I thought, or as close as we can get. Save what you can.
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